Day 299 - 13 Nov 96 - Page 03
1 at all.
2
3 MR. JUSTICE BELL: The question only arose because Miss Brophy
4 has her own opinion about salt. But the question only
5 arose because she purported to quote a government
6 publication saying 1,600 was the maximum. That is what
7 I queried. Whatever I make of her evidence generally about
8 salt, I think she may well have misunderstood what the
9 1,600 was.
10
11 MS. STEEL: That may be the way that, within the health
12 profession, those recommendations are interpreted. That
13 that is the maximum.
14
15 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Well, maybe it is. It is not what it says,
16 that is all.
17
18 MS. STEEL: I mean, I think that it is ambiguous as to what it
19 says.
20
21 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Thank you for mentioning it. I have made a
22 note, page 153, 25, 3, 1.
23
24 MS. STEEL: In our view, it is clear that you certainly do not
25 need to go over that amount and that McDonald's meals, the
26 example she gave of a cheese sandwich in addition and not
27 forgetting that there is some amount of sodium in most
28 foods, you are going to be well over that amount.
29
30 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
31
32 MS. STEEL: The other thing I just wanted to briefly mention is
33 that in terms of what standard should be adopted when
34 deciding whether or not something comes in to a -- what
35 could be considered healthy or, you know, what is best for
36 health, just that it is our view that the government
37 recommendations are conservative and that we are not
38 concerned in this court with what is attainable under the
39 present system of, you know, all the influences of
40 advertising and the promotion of junk food, and so on, but
41 we are concerned with what is the best diet, optimum diet,
42 for people to have healthy lifestyles and a much reduced
43 risk of these degenerative diseases.
44
45 Just an additional point to that, people might well find
46 recommendations more attainable if they actually knew what
47 the consequences were of eating certain types of diet and
48 what the true best type of diet was to aim for, and the
49 result that could be attained with that type of diet. It
50 may be because of all the contrary messages going out from
51 the food industry that we say these things are not bad for
52 you, and so on, it does not make any difference to your
53 health, that people would just sort of think, well, there
54 is not much point, and that is why it makes it so difficult
55 to encourage people to change their diets.
56
57 We are moving on to advertising. In this section I may as
58 well deal with -- well, I will deal with some of the points
59 relating to McDonald's deceptive advertising in terms of
60 promoting their food as nutritious, when the reality is the
